Off the Shelf - The Airship in Animal Land

This is the second collaboration between the children’s author, Clifton Bingham and the illustrator, G H Thompson to be featured here. A predecessor, The Animal’s Trip to Sea, can be seen here.  The Airship in Animal Land follows the same format and formula with 8 full-page chromolithographed plates and dates from around 1910.  In a reckless endeavour, a family of bears take to the sky in a home made aircraft, spreading alarm and consternation before crash landing after an unlikely encounter with two elephants in a balloon. The charm of the book is almost entirely due to Thompson’s lively anthropomorphic drawings, packed full with detail to engage the observant child.  Perhaps there’s a not so well hidden message to young readers about the perils of overreaching oneself, in tune with the advice of experts of the time.  But the visuals display a swaggering good humour from which no amount of preaching could seriously detract.

 

Chalk Figures

England has a sizeable collection of chalk figures incised on the nation’s hillsides.  Born of the enduring desire to leave a mark on the landscape, especially in areas where an underlying layer of chalk can easily be exposed. Horses greatly outnumber human figures and only one, the Uffington White Horse in Oxfordshire is accepted by all authorities as being of ancient origin.  There’s no agreement on the age of Uffington - Bronze Age, Romano-British and Early Modern are among existing theories.  Best known of the human figures are the Wilmington Long Man in East Sussex and the Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset.  The Long Man, grasping his two staves was a popular subject for postcards while the Cerne Abbas Giant disqualified himself from this role by publicly exhibiting his abnormal state of arousal.  The earliest recorded date for the Long Man is 1710 which makes him either a lot older or much younger than the Cerne Abbas Giant according to which of the many competing theories you subscribe to.  Some speculate that the Long Man originally sported male genitalia and that at some time in the past they were removed in the name of public decency.  If he had been spared this fate then his postcard career would never have begun.  The majority of chalk figures date from the last 250 years.  The Westbury White Horse is recorded as having been restored in 1778 to its present contours but there’s no reliable evidence of the existence of an earlier figure.  King George III was a frequent visitor to Weymouth, boosting its profile as a holiday resort in the process and in 1808 the grateful citizens had his equestrian figure inscribed on a nearby hillside at the village of Osmington. Eric Ravilious was one of several artists from the interwar years who took a fresh look at the English landscape and the ways in which it was formed by human intervention.  Chalk figures made repeat appearances in his work and included those at Westbury, Wilmington and Osmington to great effect.

 

Tibidabo, Barcelona

Tibidabo is a 500 meter hill overlooking Barcelona.  With the example of Sacré Coeur in Paris in mind and the encouragement of Pope Leo XIII, the Spanish Roman Catholic Church began construction of the Sagrat Cor (Sacred Heart) church on the summit of Mount Tibidabo in 1902. Three years later its supremacy was challenged by the impudent arrival of the Tibidabo Amusement Park which opened in 1905 (just in time for the global boom in postcard sales). An amusement park can be thrown up in a fraction of the time needed to build a cathedral and the Sagrat Cor was only completed in 1962. Since when the pair have represented the sacred and profane in a relationship of mutual reproach. The park and most of its original rides remain in operation supplemented by the regular introduction of new attractions.  Public access was via a new purpose built funicular railway that began running in 1901. Opposite the funicular station, a Moorish-styled hotel was built.  A superabundance of roller coasters and white knuckle rides suggests that the citizens of Catalunya possess an unusual appetite for dramatic demonstrations of gravitational force.  A suspended monorail (Laderas del Monte) conveys passengers in open capsules around the perimeter of the summit offering spectacular views of the city far below.  More gentle attractions - carousels, a puppet theatre and a Museum of Automata - are available but the emphasis is on vertigo-inducing contemplation of the void.  The postcard industry supplied a wide range of views of the park and recorded an exhaustive survey of the operation of the funicular railway from which this selection is drawn.